The other day I finally broke down and ordered a CrystalHD decoder chip. The CrystalHD is a hardware decoder than can decode h.264/AVC, VC1 and Mpeg2 in hardware. It plugs into a PCI-Express 1x slot. You can install it on an older mac mini or an apple tv. I have to say the results were fantastic. With some higher bitrate shows my mini would skip. But no longer with this magnificent little chip. I would recommend it for anyone who is on older hardware and doesn’t want to pay to upgrade their cpu or system in general.
One thing to note is that in order to get it to work with the latest version of osx I had to compile it from source. You can download the source here. If you are installing in osx skip the “install instructions (kext driver)” section and just enter the following into the terminal. this will let the kext load after each reboot.
sudo cp -r BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions/
sudo -S chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo -S chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
One thing I would like to see if it would ever be possible to use this with FFMPEG. Imagine having the CrystalHD decode the frames and have ffmpeg encode them in another format. This would increase transcoding times significantly since most of the computer resources would be freed. I wonder if any one has tried it out.
This is my vision of the future for media management.
In my opinion Plex, XBMC and others based off of XBMC have gotten out of control when it comes to media management. If you have one device running any of the mentioned software its fine to an extent. But as soon as you start adding multiple devices with media spanning all of those different devices it starts getting a bit out of control.
So this is my stab at what I think should be done about the different problems that I have with the current Plex / XBMC setup. Don’t get me wrong. I think they are both great pieces of software. I just believe it could be better.
Problems:
- using a remote to add a media destination is bad. User experience is poor and error prone.
- maintaining separate configurations for each player is tedious.
- No asset management across multiple devices.
- No ability to acquire new media.
In my opinion non of these items should exist with inside Plex or XBMC. In fact the only thing they should do is just render the UI and Video / Audio/ Pictures / Launch Games and very basic settings.
Let me explain the diagram… Continue Reading…
So this month marks one year my wife and I have gone without a standard video service such as cable or satellite. I have to tell you it feels good to be unplugged and to be able to still watch good quality content online on our TV or Computer. I have to say at times it has been a challenge but overall the transition has been easy. The goal of disconnecting was being able to watch the shows we want to watch with out having to pay for anything. This causes some difficulties with some things such as sports. But if you can go with out or are able to find another alternative then you are set to go.
Here is my list of free online services I use most:
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The only difficult part about watching shows online is getting the content to your TV. Some applications work better than others and so on. My favorite application to do this is PLEX. How ever if that doesn’t work for you then you may want to check out Boxee or XBMC. They both allow you to watch a lot of the online content from several sites using plugins that extend the functionality of the application. They also work great for any personal content you may use.
So you have a mac and you have a Blu-Ray drive. But you can’t figure out how to get them to work with each other. Well unfortunately for us sad folks Apple has not been very supportive of the Blu-Ray platform for what ever reason. Fortunately for us though we have people out there in the open source and hacking community that are really smart and have made it possible. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as inserting your disc and pressing play. But it can be done and it isn’t all that hard.
One of my biggest covets with xbmc is trying to fix movie and thumbnail information. It’s just a too complex of an operation for a remote and just plain annoying. Being that i don’t have a PC and only use a mac I’ve found it difficult to update the XMBC / Plex database. OSX just doesn’t have as many cool tools and developers as windows does. so I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to edit the database with a separate application. I’ve looked at using Media Companion but then i would have to figure out how to run the application under mono (which so far hasn’t worked).
So as an alternative i started looking into how XMBC and PLEX both organize and manage their thumbnails and have decided to try and make a simple application in Adobe Air to do this. Right now I’m still in the planning stages. So i’ll post more details back here as i make progress.
